There is a new stable release cycle every nine (9) months, starting
after the Luminous release (12.2.0). Each stable release series will
receive a name (e.g., ‘Mimic’) and a major release number (e.g., 13
for Mimic because ‘M’ is the 13th letter of the alphabet).

Releases are named after a species of cephalopod (usually the common
name, since the latin names are harder to remember or pronounce).

Version numbers have three components, x.y.z. x identifies the release
cycle (e.g., 13 for Mimic). y identifies the release type:

x.0.z - development releases (for early testers and the brave at heart)

x.1.z - release candidates (for test clusters, brave users)

x.2.z - stable/bugfix releases (for users)

This versioning convention started with the 9.y.z Infernalis cycle. Prior to
that, versions looked with 0.y for development releases and 0.y.z for stable
series.

Each development release (x.0.z) freezes the master development branch
and applies integration and upgrade tests before it is released. Once
released, there is no effort to backport fixes; developer focus is on
the next development release which is usually only a few weeks away.

Development release every 4 to 8 weeks

Intended for testing, not production deployments

Full integration testing

Upgrade testing from the last stable release(s)

Every effort is made to allow offline upgrades from previous
development releases (meaning you can stop all daemons, upgrade, and
restart). No attempt is made to support online rolling upgrades
between development releases. This facilitates deployment of
development releases on non-production test clusters without
repopulating them with data.

Once the initial stable release is made (x.2.0), there are
semi-regular bug-fix point releases with bug fixes and (occasionally)
small feature backports. Bug fixes are accumulated and included in
the next point release.

Stable point release every 4 to 6 weeks

Intended for production deployments

Bug fix backports for two full release cycles.

Online, rolling upgrade support and testing from the last two (2)
stable release(s) (starting from Luminous).

Online, rolling upgrade support and testing from prior stable point
releases

In the timeline above, the life time of a stable release series is
calculated to be approximately 18 months (i.e., two 9 month release
cycles) after the month of the first release. For example, Luminous
(12.2.z) will reach end of life (EOL) shortly after Nautilus (14.2.0) is
released. The lifetime of a release may vary because it depends on how
quickly the stable releases are published.

The life time for Jewel and Kraken are slightly different. Prior to
Luminous, only every other stable release was an “LTS” release.
Therefore,